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William Shaheen | all galleries >> Astronomy - Astronomical objects, images and astronomy related projects >> APOD Submissions > M51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy in Canes Venatici 14 & 17-Apr-2015
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M51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy in Canes Venatici 14 & 17-Apr-2015

Distance: 23 ± 4 Mly

A composite of images taken April 14 and 17, 2015.

Telescope configuration: Celestron EdgeHD 1400 with the Celestron 0.7x focal reducer (fl=2737mm, f/7.7).
Camera: Canon EOS 6D unbinned, IR modified. Best 10 out of 12 - 10 minute exposures at ISO 0800. Temp approx. 62F.
Image scale: 0.49 arc-sec/pixel (resampled to 0.99 arc-sec/pixel). Image capture using ImagesPlus 5.75 Camera Control.
Mount: Software Bisque Paramount MX with PEC and ProTrack enabled. Autoguided with an SBIG Sti autoguider, a Celestron OAG (off-axis guider) and a Starlight Xpress AOLF (Adaptive Optics Large Format) device using PHD2 autoguiding software, not dithered.
Post processing: ImagesPlus 6.0: Calibration, alignment, stacking using 7 dark frames, 7 bias frames and 7 flat frames, DDP, sharpening - Multi-Resolution Sharpening (wavelets), and color balance. Curves in Nebulosity3. Resized to 50pct and cropped to 1200x1600 in ThumbsPlus7. Background noise reduction/smoothing in IP. Adaptive Richardson-Lucey deconvolution (5x5 by 5 passes), adaptive median smoothing in IP.

20150414-17_CombExcAvg-IPddpmrsclr-NEBcrv-TPadj-IPnrarlnr.jpg


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